“Übermensch” Is Said in Many Ways: On the Multiplicity of Names and the Refusal of Fixity

Introduction

Anyone reading Nietzsche with even minimal attentiveness soon notices a peculiar trait: when he approaches the question of value-creation, he rarely relies on a single name. Instead, a shifting constellation of figures appears: free spirits, new philosophers, commanders and legislators, teachers of the purpose of existence, contemplatives, higher types, nobles. The temptation is to treat these expressions as loosely interchangeable, or to assume that Nietzsche simply lacked terminological discipline. Yet this reaction overlooks something essential. The multiplication of names is not a failure of precision; it is a strategy aimed precisely at resisting the illusion that a concept could ever fully capture what is at stake.

A proliferation that demands attention

Across Nietzsche’s works, the same structural role is repeatedly inhabited by different figures. In The Gay Science, the “free spirit par excellence” is described as one who dances “even near abysses” and maintains himself on “insubstantial ropes and possibilities.” In Beyond Good and Evil, a “new species of philosopher” appears, one that Nietzsche insists must not be confused with scholarly laborers or scientific specialists. These philosophers are said to be “commanders and legislators,” figures who pronounce “thus it shall be!” rather than merely offering arguments.

Nietzsche speaks in these works and elsewhere of “teachers of the purpose of existence,” those who impose meaning upon what would otherwise appear purposeless. He describes “contemplatives” who imagine themselves as spectators of life while failing to see that they are its poets. He praises the “noble” soul for its reverence toward itself and its capacity to create values without external sanction. None of these figures is simply identical with the others, yet none stands in isolation. Each illuminates a different facet of the same problematic space.

What is striking is that Nietzsche often introduces a designation only to distance himself from it. The philosophers of the future, he notes in Beyond Good and Evil, will indeed be free spirits, but not merely free spirits: something more, higher, and harder to mistake. Language advances, hesitates, then withdraws, leaving no final resting place.

Concepts as metaphors and the risk of fixation

This movement cannot be understood without recalling Nietzsche’s early reflections on language. In On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense, concepts—and truth itself—are described as metaphors that have lost their sensuous force through habitual use: “A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding.”

Words level differences; they impose sameness where only resemblance exists. Once a term solidifies, it invites the comforting belief that one has grasped the thing itself. Applied to the question of value-creation, this insight has decisive consequences. To assign a single, stable name to the creator of values would be to transform an activity into an object, a movement into a thing. Becoming would be frozen into being. Nietzsche’s resistance to such fixation helps explain why no term is allowed to dominate. Each name functions only provisionally, gesturing toward an activity that exceeds it.

The multiplicity of labels thus operates as a safeguard. By refusing to settle on one designation, Nietzsche prevents his readers from mistaking the word for the deed. The instability of language mirrors the instability of the process it seeks to evoke.

Writing philosophy through figures

If concepts cannot secure meaning without distortion, then philosophy must proceed otherwise, not by definition, but by figuration. Nietzsche’s strategy is therefore not merely theoretical; it is rhetorical. He does not aim to describe value-creation from a neutral vantage point, but to provoke, unsettle, and reorient. His figures function less like definitions than like lenses. Each offers a perspective, highlighting certain traits while obscuring others.

This helps explain Nietzsche’s habit of self-correction. He anticipates misunderstanding and preempts it by exceeding his own formulations. The reader is not meant to rest content with any single figure, but to experience the insufficiency of each. In this sense, Nietzsche’s writing performs what it claims: it enacts the impossibility of final capture.

Persuasion plays a central role here. Nietzsche appeals not only to reason, but also to aspiration and affect. The character of the speaker, the tone of the address, and the emotions it arouses are inseparable from the conceptual content. The plurality of names allows these different appeals to operate without collapsing into a rigid schema.

An implicit resonance

Although Nietzsche writes decades before later critiques of metaphysical presence, his practice already moves according to a familiar logic. Meaning is deferred rather than delivered. No name achieves full presence; each points beyond itself to another. The chain does not terminate in an essence but remains open.

This openness should not be mistaken for obscurity. On the contrary, it reflects a disciplined refusal to idolize language. Naming becomes an activity rather than a designation, a gesture rather than a conclusion. What matters is not the final term, but the movement among terms.

Conclusion

Nietzsche’s proliferation of names does not resolve interpretive confusions; it helps account for their persistence. Readers continue to ask what the creator of values “really is” because they expect concepts to function as anchors. Nietzsche denies them that comfort. By multiplying labels, he resists reification and forces attention back to the activity of valuation itself. The question, then, is no longer which name is correct, but what is lost when a name is allowed to harden. Nietzsche leaves that question deliberately unanswered—and in doing so, remains faithful to his own critique of language.

References

Nietzsche, F. (1974). The Gay Science (W. Kaufmann, Trans.). Vintage Books.
Nietzsche, F. (1966). Beyond Good and Evil (W. Kaufmann, Trans.). Vintage Books.
Nietzsche, F. (1978). Thus Spoke Zarathustra (W. Kaufmann, Trans.). Penguin Books.
Nietzsche, F. (1979). On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense. In Philosophy and Truth (D. Breazeale, Ed.).